In ancient Norse myth the universe was a tree at whose roots a worm gnawed. When the worm brought the tree down, the ultimate battle between good and evil would happen.

Lately I’ve been wondering if they were mostly right.

Our own civilization is a sort of tree, with its roots in property rights and the rule of law, and its branches lifting the rarefied heights of science, technology, arts, and literature.

For the last forty years in the U.S. — longer in other places – a worm has been gnawing at the roots and sickening the tree. That worm is the philosophy of Karl Marx.

Karl Marx is described as a nineteenth century philosopher (which is true) but also as an economist, a historian, and a sociologist (which are only true if prefaced with “very bad.”)

Marxist theory is now applied to all those fields and more. (In the 70s, in Portugal, I studied it in history, sociology, economics, literature, art, and philosophy. They were only waiting for the proper choreography to teach Marxist interpretive dance in Phys Ed). Because of its many permutations, and how it has been interpreted, it would take me a small tome to take Marx to the woodshed properly and cut through the Gordian knot Marxists have woven around his thought. (These disciples now, like a restaurant changing its name after a case of food poisoning, call themselves Marxian, instead of Marxist.)

I don’t have a small tome, so I’ll have to be brutally simplistic. At his most basic, Marx believed history could be described as a struggle between classes, in which each class rose to the top with each new change in the means of production and ownership of said means. He believed in the future the proletariat — urban workers — would seize the means of production and thereby institute a dictatorship. After that a miracle would occur, the state would naturally wither away, and this would lead to a utopian, classless society, where everything worked on the basis of “From each according to his ability and to each according to his need.” (I’ve always suspected this last step involved unicorn flatulence and, possibly, skittles.)

We were never told how this miracle would occur, though at least in the Soviet interpretation, it entailed the appearance of a new creature, a Homo Sovieticus, devoid of greed and egoism. Which shows you that even those trying to bring Marxist paradise to fruition realized that it required every man to be a combination saint and ant.

But it is worse than that. Even if the Homo Sovieticus had issued forth from Lenin’s laboring over Marx, neither this fabled creature nor its minions could make a Marxist society work.

Marx’s problems extend to the whole definition of “class.” He might have seen it as a purely economic concept, which is how it was taught to me in economics in Portugal. It might be he thought those who labored for others were always proletarians. But in the real world, things have become a lot more complex. Are farmers proletarian or not? What about tenant farmers? How about tenant farmers who own a cow? (Marx, the blood of the Kulaks is on your hands.)

More importantly — more damagingly — though, Marx managed to be an economist who did not understand the most fundamental concept of economics: value.

It is thought he based his theory of value on David Ricardo, who was already considered erroneous and out of date when Marx used it. Which is no wonder, because no functional economy can be built on Marx.

Marx believed that raw materials + labor = value. The more the raw materials were worth or the more labor put into transforming them, the more the end product would be worth. No other considerations applied.

Clearly Marx never taught a child to cook. You start with raw materials worth something, you spend hours on cooking (and putting out small fires), and the result is, more often than not, a mess that has to be thrown away. This disproves his theory, which is not exactly hard as it’s a very silly theory. It doesn’t take into account such things as distribution. Because to Marx, value is value is value. Marx thought an Appalachian quilt would be worth the exact same thing in the small town where it was made as in the most artsy areas of New York City — and no monetary reward should go to anyone who transports and resells the thing. More importantly, since no one should resell, if a NYC resident wants a quilt, he’d best intuit they exist and travel to the Appalachians to buy it. At least, according to Uncle Karl.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, where people don’t often wander the countryside looking for products they never heard of, value is based on what someone is willing to pay. Therefore, a quilt might be worth time and materials in the Appalachian, combined with its value as something to keep warm under. But it will be worth that plus a sizable premium for craft collectors in NYC. This means the middle-man who serves that market deserves the fee he pockets and — if he’s smart — goes back to the Appalachians and offers more money for better quilts so he can make more money.

Again in the real world, someone can invent a process that takes raw materials, up till then considered useless, and turns them into something valuable. (Gas powered engines. Various kinds of cosmetic mud. For that matter, going back far enough in history, pottery-clay and metal.)

In the Marxist world this makes no sense. First, his predictions for the future never took into account the possibility of technological innovation beyond his own era. Manufacturing would always be massive and labor-intensive, and the only way to make life more equitable was for the workers to own the means of production. Second, it never occurred to him that something valueless can be made valuable through innovation and invention.

This is why societies driven by Marxist principles only produce an abundance of turnips and, perhaps, size 52 shoes for the left foot — because value is value and what people want doesn’t matter.

But famines and the abject poverty of Marxian paradises notwithstanding, the damage is yet deeper.

His world was a closed economy of limited value. If raw materials + labor = value, then there is a finite amount of both and therefore a finite amount of value in the world and all we can do is slice it into ever thinner slices.

This led Marx and his followers to believe that old prophet of doom, Malthus, and therefore view humans as a net drain on society. No matter how much they labored, after all, there was an upper limit to how productive they could be and besides they’d all have to use the same, dwindling, raw materials. It also led them to believe anyone who had more than the bare necessities had “stolen” the wealth from others. Also, since value was viewed as raw materials + labor, his theory now leaves all those who work in non-material products, like software, or books, or music, or movies (now that they’re divorced of the physical object) feeling like thieves who don’t do anything and yet get compensation.

Of course this is nonsense, but Marxist precepts are so imbued in society they’ve become the unexamined basis of many people’s thought. So, this explains the left’s twin obsessions with ridding the Earth of surplus humans (and in its ultimate iteration of all humans save for a chosen few living in harmony or something, aka Homus Avataricus) and the guilt of intellectuals over getting goods they didn’t “produce.”

But no one can live with guilt forever. Or at least no one – except for a few monks — can live in guilt and holy poverty for very long. So our university indoctrinated/educated intellectuals eventually turn it around.

It goes like this — if all excess wealth is theft, then of course we should all have only the bare minimum. But in this corrupt modern society, with so many people, there’s always going to be theft. So, if someone is going to steal, why shouldn’t I? At least I feel guilty about it. And I’m a good person and — insert proof of “goodness” here — donate to progressive causes or eat organic food or volunteer at the homeless shelter or drive a Prius or…

People who perform acts of Marxian “atonement” feel like they have a license to steal. Everyone is doing it. And besides, they deserve it. And furthermore, ALL wealth is theft.

This attitude has corrupted both our government and our business to the point where capitalism works only by fits and starts and in the spaces between. People who believe they are in a world of thieves try to steal before they’re stolen from, to backstab before they’re stabbed in the back. And the government tries to oversee the theft in the serene belief its job is to distribute to those who have less and, of course, favor themselves and their friends, who look out for the “little people.”

Respect for private property erodes. Wealth is seen as evil and humans as drains on the system. Our finances lurch from crisis to bubble to crisis under the aegis of crony capitalism. Movies and books demonize business people and extol “selfless” bureaucrats.

Forget Ragnarok and the great battle between good and evil after the fall of the world tree. The battle is now and we’re in it.

I believe wealth can be created. I believe this is best facilitated by removing the Marxians from any power over the economy. I believe each human brings within himself the possibility of making an invention which can give us infinite wealth.

Who is with me?

Sarah Hoyt lives in Colorado with her husband, two sons and too many cats. She has published Darkship Thieves and 16 other novels, and over 100 short stories. Writing non-fiction is a new, daunting endeavor. For more on Sarah and samples of her writing, look around at Sarah A. Hoyt.com or check out her writing and life blog at According to Hoyt.com.

Sigh. Time was, I would have responded that this is “everybody knows” stuff. Decades of probing — sometimes, subtly, sometimes rather brutally — what those around me really know has taught me better. But Miss Hoyt, there’s a deeper tragedy behind that one.

Have you ever heard the phrase “vulgar Marxism?” That’s the new intellectual bastion for Marxism, with which its stalwarts defend its failures in objective reality. Labor Theory of Value? Oh, that’s vulgar Marxism. Given a shallow understanding such as that, it’s no wonder it didn’t work in practice. (And boyohboy, does it ever not work in practice!) Marxian theory is much too involute and ramified to be implemented by people with no better grasp of it than that!

That riposte is what you get when you question a “professional Marxist” — e.g., one in academia — about Marxism’s theoretical omissions and practical failures. Of course, it’s only a pseudo-sophisticated variation on the old mantra that “we have to get the right people into power.” But the problem of “sunk intellectual capital,” which is more severe at lesser levels of intelligence (where most devoted Marxists dwell), obstructs the intellectual leap to that conclusion. Thus the intellectual charlatans of Marxism sit, secure in their bastions.

Yes, a Marxian Niohoggr has been gnawing at civilization’s roots. Worse, he’s almost at the dessert course. Worst, the dessert will be us.

It is a good analysis but omits something even more foundational. When I took sociology (straight-out, unabashed Marxist Indoctrination at my school), they started with the idea that “there is no such thing as human nature” (basically, whatever we perceive as human nature is 100% social construct, nothing inherent). It was critical to them that they hammer this into everyone’s head before laying out the labor theory of value. It speaks to the idea of how workers would be a combination of “saints and ants”…I guess the idea is that in time, the proletariat can be trained/re-acculturated to become saint/ant. It’s while this re-training occurs that you need an elite “vanguard” to lead the way…these of course the government elites that arose with the lavish dachas outside Moscow. Whenever a student in my classes would question how the Marxist utopia would unfold given human nature, they were immediately reminded “no such thing, idiot”.

If you think about it, it’s idiotic to even suggest human nature does not exist. You can argue we have an incorrect understanding of human nature I suppose, but this “no human nature” foundation is absurd on it’s face.

Meanwhile though, our U.S. “vanguard” is busy getting itself organized to take over.

And you’ve just hit on the “reason” behind “re-education camps.” Although they were called that, really they were just the means whereby people smart enough to question the Marxian thing were worked to death. But it sounded so much better when explaining the disappearances. “Re-education camp” sounds inifitely preferable to “slave labor until you slowly starve to death prison.”

Even more basic is animal nature. I forget the ornithologist’s name but 40 years after Marx died he figured out male birds weren’t fighting over females. They were fighting over territory. Once they had the territory, and defended it from others of their own species, the females would come, knowing that the male had a big enough territory to keep them and their offspring fed, and interlopers could be chased away with an almost unbeatable home court advantage. (Compare Chancellorsville and Gettysburg). When the Apaches, Spanish, Mexicans and then Texans started to encroach on the Comache buffalo hunting fields from 1680 through 1875, the Comaches went aggressively crazy, successfully killing, kidnapping and torturing thousands of their enemies and chasing them away and loving every minute. It was the territorial imperative. (See Robert Ardrey).

If territory (read property) rights are written into our animal DNA, we might see a history among humans of territorial wars, and if pecking orders are written too, we might see class divisions. We do. Marx cannot change it and all these discoveries were post Marx. He had no idea.

Capitalism is a plus sum game and works because it is consistent with out DNA. Socialism, a negative sum game, that reduces the supply of wealth as we are forced to divide it up for the undeserving. Naturally, it doesn’t work for the same reason.

In our country it is easy to beat the socialists. They are reducing the wealth supply. It is observable, duplicatible and rationally explainable why that is so. The poorest in the West are minorities. So reducing the wealth supply hurts poor minority children first and worst so Socialism is racist to its core. Socialists are racist. Against minorities. Attack ‘em there and they will not know how to defend themselves and ultimately they should lose their support among those they exploit. That’s where we hit them.

In short Ms. Hoyt. I am with you. Biology is with you and ultimately, History is with you, too.

An interesting overview and critique of Marxism and Marxianism (?), no doubt many readers will find it helpful to establish a basic understanding of the theory. I think the only value in considering Marxism today is that like Freudian psychology, it had some significant impact on western thought over the past century and still has some explanatory power. The article takes an odd turn at the end however with the call to “…remove the Marxians from any power…”. How does the author propose we identify and remove them?

Well Tim, one could start with folks who openly declare they want to “share the wealth” or redistribute the wealth. That’s a dead giveaway, no? Also, I would include anyone who uses words like collective, the economy, society, social justice, or any other vague, undefinable terminology and actually believe they’ve said something when uttering them.

all it takes is a simple compare/contrast examination between the 2 systems
give examples throughout history where free markets thrived and where collectivist systems thrived and look at the results

another point is the fact that collectivist systems must attach itself to a healthy capitalist host (or there would be no wealth to steal) just like the blood-sucking parasite needs a vibrant “host” to latch itself upon

Years ago, I heard about a woman who thought it was immoral to hold a garage sale; apparently she thought that the stuff should just be given away. I didn’t know her personally so I couldn’t question her on her beliefs, but now it’s clear: she was a Marxist who thought nothing should be resold.

By the way, do you know where he says that? I’ve never heard it before.

I don’t know where, but it seems like an natural conclusion. Marx believed the value of an object was due to the labor put into making it (and the raw materials), so a previous owner contributed nothing to the value of the object but paid for it in full and gotten all of their use out of it, so therefore had no right to charge any value.

So I looked up Kulak, and it appears that they were eventually defined according to a number of things. One of them was if you sold anything to others, you were automatically a “Kulak” and subject to all the punishments there-of.

Kulak were the peasants with small plots of land and farming equipment. Those that did the sort of hard labor that “the planners” fantasize about having others do. Their property, equipment, crops and even seeds were seized by the state so that they could be starved and eliminated, since they didn’t fit into the dialectic of Mr. Marx as applied by the Soviets.

Reminds me of an exchange overheard at a cocktail party decades ago. The ex-husband said sneeringly to the new husband, “How do you like handling used goods?” The new husband replied, “I like it just fine, especially when I get past the used part.”

We all saw how “well” Marxism worked in the Soviet Union and we ar now seeing the economic effects of socialism on Europe, which is now basically bankrupt and looking for massive bailouts. When will people, especially the far left in both Europe and the United States, finally admit that this stuff just doesn’t work? Probably never. They would rather see their countries go bankrupt than admit that they were wrong all along.

Oh It works wonderfully for those in power to whom all the money actually tends to flow — for a time — then they’ve destroyed what they wanted to rule and everything falls apart. Witness the former Soviet Union. Now for normal folks who just want to make a living and raise their families in peace?

It’s the difference between the horse and the pig. The pig is ‘more equal’, leading and getting all the benefits of the farm. The horse works hard to make the worker’s paradise… then is sent to the glue factory for a bit more coin in the fat swine’s coffers.

But then, that’s the basis of every pyramid scheme, right? The hope that you have a chance to rise up to the top, and those that are at the top never letting the bottom rung get a step higher.

Wherever did you get this idea that “Europe is basically bankrupt”? It’s a bit curate’s egg-ish – some parts are doing well, some are not. You wouldn’t approve of Europeans defining the USA by the quality of life in Detroit or the rust belt, would you?

What parts of Europe would you characterize as “doing well”? Monaco, perhaps? Seriously, numbers proving solvency of any country larger than Rhode Island would be appreciated. Because otherwise this is a very tired rehash of oneupsmanship, characterized by the cliche’d, “but not in the south!” phrase trotted out to demonstrate the second speaker knows enough about the subject to cut the first speaker down.

So, in the interests of morbid curiosity, I’d seriously like to know which “parts” (I notice you did not say “countries”) of Europe are doing well. Perhaps a neighborhood here and there in the rural districts, far from the grasping hands of government officials?

I’ve thought for a long time that we didn’t really win the Cold War like we won World War II. Of course certain areas of the world such as eastern Europe were liberated from Soviet dominance and became relatively free. But Marxist influence and power lives on in the West.

Apologists for Marxism should be as denigrated as Holocaust deniers are. As Mrs. Hoyt wrote, Marx is responsible for the blood of Kulaks, and I would argue for millions of others. Marx advocated class warfare, dictatorship and oppression, supposedly resulting in liberation eventually for his chosen ones. Yet his systems always result in evil, whether it is oppression of the mind or also oppression of the body.

Remember the movie “Alien,” after the facehugger suddenly dies and leaves John Hurt still alive, feeling a bit dazed but otherwise OK? That’s what happened when we “won” the cold war. Unfortunately, as this article explains, the parasite is still living inside. We’re hoping it won’t someday burst out, turn into a giant, icky monster and kill everybody.

100%. According to Chang’s “Mao”, he murdered SEVENTY million people. And he wasn’t even really as Communist, just a megalomaniac. In fact ,without Marx, we wouldn’t have had Hitler either, as the COmmunists in Germqny scared people into wanting an alternative.

They also did what the Czar couldn’t do after a century of trying – destroy the Jewish religion in Greater Russia.

Catholic historian Paul Johnson (“Intellectuals”) considers Communism to be a form of anti-semitism, extended to a class. Marx’s father converted the family to Christinity (presumably to get ahead), and Marx was a vicious, outspoken (presumably self-hating) anti-semite.

Marx appeals to habitual underachievers who would rather blame others for their failings than to summon the effort to elevate their own existence. As long as sloth tolerated, Marx will have an audience.

What really amazes me is UnGodlywood’s Marxian complicity…. where capitalist/achievers are predictably the bad guys. (ie. the Devil Wears Prada) Why is it so uncool to openly compete for advancement when competition strengthens particularly in the sports arena???? Don’t celebs hire the BEST lawyers to negotiate their mega bucks contracts?. I guess it’s okay so long as the hypocrites are championing the down-trodden.

I think you’re right concerning contemporary America. Seems like Marxism thrives on poverty, oppression, and grievance. In the States, everybody has lots of grievances but much less in the way of poverty and oppression. I think that’s why Marxism never became a true mass movement here. That and the fact that it’s an import. It may have described the situation in Europe pretty well but wasn’t relevant to the US. We never had the centuries-old, entrenched class system that Europe did.

In other times and places – like Marx’s Europe or some modern Third World countries – there’s more than sloth involved. People suffer from real problems that have nothing to do with their willingness to work. Unfortunately for them, Marxism often looks like the ultimate solution – one that explains their situation, justifies their resentments, puts the blame on someone else, and gives them license to redress their grievances in ways that normally would be unthinkable. Marxists often claim to be involved in a revolutionary “struggle.” What they’re really doing is taking a shortcut – bypassing civilized behavior and going straight to their goal by taking what they want and eliminating anyone who stands in their way.

It should be noted that the stronghold of Marxism in the USA is now and always has been the Ivy League and other institutions of learning where a pampered elite live in the world of unreality. These functionaries enjoy arguing abstract economic theories while millions of human beings are deprived of life , liberty and happiness throughout the world under their favorite type of government. No America did not win the cold war against communism because communism was and is alive and thriving whereever an American academic holds power. And now American churches because of their contamination by the educational elites are now carrying the flag of Marxism into the world. Again a group of pampered protected elites think that they can solve all the problems of the word by bowing down to Karl Marx, a sinister idol of the new world order.

Yes, I too have seen the baneful effects of Marxism first-hand in churches since at least the 1970′s. The “Social Gospel” spread its harmful influence beginning in the 19th Century. And “Liberation Theology” and similar far-left dogmas have gained footholds in some circles within Roman Catholicism and Protestant churches for some decades now, with such sterling characters in this country as our president’s long-time pastor Jeremiah Wright. And in addition to Wright there are several less prominent leftist clergy, especially in the mainline denominations. Seminaries in the USA have gone way over the edge as a whole, although there are still a few good Bible-believing ones left.

Also, beware of any church program that promotes “Social Justice.” Oftentimes these programs are much closer in ideology to Margaret Sanger and Karl Marx than they are to Jesus. Of course Jesus forcefully argued for justice and rightly so, but His justice is nothing like the Marxist–sorry Marxian–kind.

Many Americans should look more closely at where their money donations to churches are going, especially if they contribute to mainline denominations. I grew up in the United Methodist Church, and while it hasn’t gone quite as far off the deep end as most of the other mainline denominations, it has more than its share of far-left elements, and it sometimes channels money to left-wing causes. In my parents’ UMC church during the 1970′s, one of the pastors insisted on having a Planned Parenthood office within the church building!!! Before long he moved on from being a “preacher” to rising high in the UMC administrative hierarchy. I read how during the Vietnam War, a sizeable number of students in seminaries were there taking advantage of student deferments to avoid the military, and were sorely lacking in Christian faith. Many of them, along with other liberals and far-leftists, moved on to become bigwigs in mainline hierarchies and still promote non-Christian “Social Justice.”

Say more about Jesus here; yes he does have the parable of the buried talent, but there seems to be a lot more anti-materialistic “harder for a rich man to enter into heaven…” etc stuff. This sharing, communal strand of Christianity has a lot to do with our current policies toward social justice. I get capitalism and I get Jesus; I just don’t get how the two are supposed to fit together.

There is no question that culturally, our country has stitched Jesus into a pattern which also includes war and the markets. The basic rationale appears to be: well of course Jesus would not want us to be weak or poor. One might get such a view from HUMAN common sense, but I don’t see a lot of that view in Jesus…which is why I pay less attention to him as I get older.

Dwight you raise a very important and provocative point. I have often cringed at the “peace at any price” nature of modern day Christianity. Two points to consider: 1) discernment and 2) free will. God gave us the first to recognize evil and oppose it… and the later as an option to believe in Him and or to choose to share from our own table with the less fortunate. Forced charity is NOT charity but theft. Modern day Marxians that work for the government make a great show of COMPASSION for the poor as justification for siphoning money out of rest of us while feathering their own nests. (ie. the IMF 3rd World Development Fund Creep recently arrested for assault in a lavish Hotel on our nickel)

The government is NOT the hand of God commissioned to implement social justice as many on the Marxian Left like to pretend.

Dwight, “harder for a rich man to enter into heaven…” The rest is… “but with God, all things are possible.”

Back then, there was only one way to become rich, as is true in most countries today. You had to be part of the power structure. You had to be IN government, or CONNECTED to government. Even the priesthood was part of it. You basically had to steal the wealth. This was something everyone understood then. But, Jesus was telling them they could become rich and still be moral. They did not have to sell out.

Today, with Capitalism, you can grow rich readily as a moral man. One can still steal more through the government. Yet, the rare righteous man can still exceed the riches of the richest of the thieves.

He will also be far more wealthy. Notice the difference between the words rich and wealthy. Jesus said rich, not wealthy. The wealthy man has the love of his fellow man and of God.

To properly understand the Bible, one must also understand the times and customs back then. I’m a Lutheran. Our pastors must learn Greek, Latin, and Aramaic, so they can study the Bible in the original texts. The services are not mere liturgies. If yours is an active mind, I highly recommend checking it out.

You used to comment here lots more. You used to argue the Left’s position. I think as times have become more ugly, and the truth becomes more evident, you defend the Left less. I heard the doubt and reflection in your post. You are not liking the results you see, but at the same time, you cannot embrace the Right, because of your beliefs about us.

You seem at your core to be a decent and intelligent guy, Dwight, but your faith is weak. It is weak, because you have accepted certain lies and distortions. Politically you lean Left, but at rare times, you swerve suddenly Right. You are not consistent, which tells me you are confused, warring with yourself at times. Please, take another look at the Bible. I invite you to go to a Lutheran church, where I think things will be explained more fully to you.

It is interesting that you come up with the assertion that “rich” is different now than it was then. Once you go that route, you can adjust anything in the Bible. Since there was no United States then, all the references to the government and Caesar, might get changed.

Of course, I have been trying to convince people here that much of the same phenomenon applies to the Constitution, since so much as changed since it was written. But we know that the Constitution was written by men and we have good records regarding the whole process of writing and ratifying it. The Bibel, on the other hand…

I certainly have a lot of doubts about leftism, but there is a meanness of spirit, anger and general broad condemnation that I hear in so many posters here. Someone has taken something away from them and they will rage until they get it back. In some ways, the Jesus thing remains central. The outrage here that someone is being forced to do something, pay something, evokes none of the kind of other-worldliness/spirituality, acceptance I hear in Jesus. In my younger years, we read the Bible every day; it was believed to be the source of all truth. What it DID do was make me appreciate the written word.

Here I hear so many people who are usually resentful, bitter, holding grudges, despising Obama, despising the lefties in society, blah, blah. etc. I’m sure that I would hear a different version of the same on lefty sites, but the idea that either side has a monopoly on truth, or decency, the truth and decency that will make us free, or at least permit us to live with each other in peace is a dream, as far as I can see. An apparently decent person, such as you appear to be, must have some feelings about the level of discourse here; more importantly the consciousness of people who think and spout this way. I don’t mean to make it sound evil, but it is very unpleasant, sometimes on the cusp of pathological. It’s almost as if some righties go about proving that lefties are wrong about mankind being “good” by making it a point to be so “bad” themselves.

I cannot reply yet to your follow-up comment, so I will reply to the earlier post again.

Weakness: “When a man slaps your right cheek, turn the other cheek.”

People think that means slough it off. It does not. It means stand up for yourself. Back then, they all wiped with their left hands. One simply did not slap a man with that hand. It was unclean, a social taboo.

To slap a man’s right cheek was to backhand him. A backhand blow is a weak one, reserved for women and children, to keep them in line without risk of really hurting them. To slap a man like that was to treat him as a woman.

The Bible was telling folks, you may not be able to lick the guy, but make him at least treat you like a man, not some punk-ass beyotch.

Poor: “Poverty is a curse.”

So, yes, Jesus does address these things, he just does not dwell on them. They are not exactly sublime. Pretty basic things like that do not require much explanation.

He does speak much of charity, though. He speaks of faith, of works, of love for your fellow man. These are things which need lots of explaining to most folks.

You said Jesus was the problem. There is the fault in your thinking. God exists. He created all things. All came from him. He manifested himself here on Earth as Jesus. How can He be the problem? If faced with the choice between God being the problem, or mankind being the problem, isn’t it a certainty that mankind is the problem? How can you look at mankind and come to any other conclusion than that we are at fault? How can you possibly blame God?

God gave us Ten Commandments. Live this way. Obey these rules or live with the consequences. The punishments for violating the rules are built-in. Look at all the wickedness, and you will always see these Commandments being violated. When you ignore Jesus, you deny God. You violate the First Commandment. “I am the Lord thy God… Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” He said shall not. Not coulda shoulda kinda oughta maybe not. He said shall not. He’s not kidding around.

But the Leftists do this regularly. They worship Gaia. They worship Man in a collectivist belief system. They have anti-God Marxism. The Islamists worship the Moon and Star. The Moon-god of Ur, and Lucifer, the Morning Star. They all have the tyrannical mindset. Wickedness is in their hearts, because God is not. They mouth pious-seeming words, but their actions are purely evil, all the while considering themselves good people… the very BEST of people.

Dwight, you need to look in the mirror and start judging yourself, not judge God. You do not get to judge God. He judges you. That’s how it works.

On the flipside are all those who believe that God has pre-destined every nano second of their lives. They directly praise God for all they percieve as good in their lives and for all else [indirectly] blame God, in that God, just didn’t pre-destine great wealth, great health, sound marriages, etc., for them.

The gift of free agency escapes all to many, but fortunately, not our founding fathers.

I think, Dwight, that Marc Malone makes the key point in response to some of your concerns when he emphasises, “but with God, all things are possible.” In a very real way, almost all of us are like the rich man in the story–we want to cling to the things of this world, and it takes the miracle of Jesus Christ to save us. The rich man in the story had his riches as a great obstacle–but for the rest of us it is often something else–pride, sexual obsession, hatred, etc. But it is still possible for a rich man or woman, or you or me, with all of our sins, to be saved through Jesus, if that rich person or you or I follow Him. This is what the New Testament teaches. But we cannot do it on our own, and God doesn’t promise that it will always be easy for us after we’re saved.

Jesus didn’t care what background any of his followers had. They could be poor, wealthy, prostitutes, tax collectors, fishermen, whatever. He treated Roman soldiers with love and dignity, in fact performing a miracle on behalf of a Roman Centurion. These soldiers were considered to be among the oppressors of Jesus’ time and place. With traditional Christian and Jewish morality, it is the individual and his or her choices which count, not the class which that person belongs to. Marxism and Political Correctness are very different. In practice with Marxism, it is not so much the individual, for instance, as the class that is important.

I feel that others are better at expressing some of these differences than I am, and certainly there have been great Christian writers such as C. S. Lewis and Evelyn Waugh who have forcefully shown the differences between Christ and Marx. These are just some of my paltry attempts at responding at the moment. Maybe others here can do better.

I hit “submit” before I cleaned up and completed my 6:04 pm message. I meant to say that Christianity teaches and emphasises individual worth and freedom, as opposed to the collective emphasis in Marxism. There was slavery in the time of the New Testament, and great Christians like Paul were not social revolutionaries like those we see today. But still, in the West we got much of our beliefs in the value of the individual from what Jesus, Paul and other Christians taught.

Some Marxists will always claim that Marxism results in freedom, but it never has worked out that way. Nations such as the UK and the USA which followed in the Judeo-Christian tradition created more individual freedom than was ever found elsewhere. And in places like eastern Europe under the Soviets, China and Africa, Christianity has been a great force on behalf of the individual in everyday life.

It seems to me that Marx’s writings always encourage the valuing of the collective over the individual. And this emphasis on the collective at the expense of the individual has been repeatedly put into practice by Marxist regimes, with the result that millions of individuals have died for “the greater good.”

I tried replying to you earlier, Dwight, but I hit “submit” too early and might have otherwise messed up my reply.

I am a Protestant, but one of the greatest Christian books, I think, is the novel “Brideshead Revisited” by the devout Roman Catholic Evelyn Waugh. Some people get a little too caught up in how it dwells on the lives of some sometimes very irritating wealthy people. Yet if you read the book to the end, it packs an incredible punch–at least it did with me–with a message of the redemption that is offered by Christ. I have never seen anything in Marxist or otherwise far-left literature which offers such a humane and hopeful message. I highly recommend it.

Also, Marxism and other forms of Leftism deny the basic fallen nature of mankind. This fallen nature is one of the basic beliefs of Christianity, and based upon my 49 years of life on this earth I’m completely convinced that we are all hopelessly fallen, without the aid of God.

Michael Voris has an excellent series on YouTube about how Saul Alinsky and the Communists consciously targeted the Catholic Church in the 1960s. They have now succeeded in taking over half of it; that’s why half of them voted for pro-abortion Obama. For decades, honest Catholics have actually been tithing to marxist causes such as abortion. This is a scandal deserving of much more publicity.

“From each according to his ability and to each according to his need.”

I’ve been a tax accountant for most of my life. I never met a client willing to focus on that “from each” part of the equation. They only wanted to know how I could help them with that “to each” part. And I’ve never heard anyone the slightest bit interested in that “ability” and “need” business.

As for value=labor plus material, the only backers of that proposition I ever met was cost plus contractors and those usually wound up in court trying to collect.

>>They would rather see their countries go bankrupt than admit that they were wrong all along.<<
It is very, very difficult, impossible even, for people (including you and me) to admit that they were wrong about anything.

I think you are both right! It can be extremely hard to admit that one is wrong, and has been wrong in one’s thinking all one’s life; and once that hurdle has been jumped and the consuming fear quenched, the future discovery of other misapprehensions is henceforth a thing of joy, as one learns more truth about oneself and the world. That initial admission, in a physics analogy, has enormous starting friction, like the wheels of a train. Once the train has left the station with the wheels of that admission turning, future pushes are known to put more power to the engine for greater speed or control.

I simply don’t remember the personal stories of each of these individuals well enough to answer you in detail right now; I have to go out of town in a few minutes and simply don’t have the time to research it. But I’m pretty sure that Brezhnev was not an engineer at least in the way that I would define “engineer”. As I recall, he was a tractor repairman early in his life and parlayed that into jobs within the Communist Party.

As for Stalin, he was definitely not an engineer in any conventional meaning of that word, although Czech-Canadian writer Josef Skvorecky wrote a book about him called “The Engineer of Human Souls” which might be confusing you. Stalin, in fact, was studying to be a Russian Orthodox priest but was booted out of his seminary for Marxist activism. He then spent four months as an astronomer’s assistant in an observatory. On the very last day of 1899, as the scientists were preparing to ring in the New Year, Stalin failed to show up and never did another honest day’s work in his life. He devoted his life to the Revolution and became an organizer of “expropriations” from the capitalists. In more conventional terminology, he organized bank robberies, although he never participated in one. He was arrested and convicted for his activities several times and went through several bouts of “internal exile” in Siberia. These consisted of him living in remote villages, sharing rented accomodations with fellow Marxists where they could study Marxism together. (And build up great animosities. Stalin had an amazing capacity to hold a grudge and his greatest pleasure was to plan his revenge. In many cases, he waited decades to get even with erstwhile comrades who had offended him in some way.) I could go on but if Stalin ever had even a shred of engineering training, it has escaped the knowledge of everyone who has ever written about him.

Stalin was only an engineer in the sense that Skvorecky uses it. He imagined that Marxism was going to transform society, just as today’s leftists continue to believe that.

Pretty much anything with practical results requires the ability to learn from past mistakes and build on that.

I think even such esoteric things as religion or political science, or physical mechanical stuff like building a tool shed in the backyard requires ability to say ‘ok that did not work so how can I fix it next time.

I do not think that was the basic premise of Marxism or communism. Limited though my understanding is.

Marx wanted a science based on what he knew at the time. He did not account that conditions might change. The ideas of fixed wealth. Obviously not the case. Economics is much more dynamic than that.

Socialism in the way we think about it now, is not dead. Consider the idea of public education or public health.

If the US dropped total support for those things, which both require wealth transfer, what might happen?

No education laws or confiscated money to support such. No FDA or any such public health regulation.

Um, public education can be handled *much* better privately. Has been, and is now. Horace Mann broke the back of private education because he wanted to get “superstition” (by which he meant Christianity, especially Catholicism) out of education. At the time of the first census, approximately 90+% of the population was functionally literate (could read well enough to do business, write their name, etc). I think right now, after nearly 200 years of public education, that number is significantly lower. Private education was mostly done, all-but-free of charge (as in, donate a bucket of coal or a dozen eggs or whatever you could afford), by churches. Grammar school was called that because Greek and Latin grammar were taught, along with math, history and the Constitution. If you graduated 8th grade you had what is, in today’s terms, an undergraduate degree: you could teach school, or run a business, or start a newspaper, or study with a lawyer, or study with a doctor. Public schools were devised specifically to make sure that the kids who “graduated” weren’t “over-educated” — they were supposed to be willing workers in the mindless jobs that factories demanded. Good little worker-bees. Is it any wonder that public schools and universities are staffed nearly 100 percent with liberals? They are the elite, who will choose those deemed worthy to join the ranks of the elite, while excluding anyone who doesn’t buy into the hive-mind.

As to Marx’s use of already outdated examples and ideas: any system that involves a zero-sum assumption must necessarily exclude ideas outside its purview and disallow any future advances or events that would render it unrealistic. The basic problem here is actually rational analysis itself. At any given time in history the construction of any comprehensive system requires the use of only that information that is available at that time. Even if the cherry-picking of information is not allowed and one is forced to use ALL of the material available, any system will be obsolete within minutes or even at the very moment of its formation. Rational analysis can never come up with w system that actually does its intended purpose. This is the advantage of Mises’ praxeology. It is not rational in the analytical sense, it is based on the receptive intellectus of Cusanus.

Was not Marx circa 1850 ish? The wonder of it is that his ideas are still espoused. That begs the question, what is it about the alternative, whether you call it capitalism or free markets, that have remained so unconvincing? Myself, I believe the problem lies far outside economic theory. The problem comes from human aspirations for power over one another. Free markets just don’t offer opportunities for the fulfillment of the most power hungry among us. Which leads to a whole other problem. Since any social construct to the political left of anarchy requires some power concentrations in the hands of a few, how may society regulate that grip and reach to objects suited to liberty and pursuit of happiness? The economic theories are but vehicles to transport concentrations of power. Obviously our constitution, no matter how brilliantly written is not up to the task. By itself or even with millions, no hundreds of millions of adherents it has not been able to loosen the grip the power hungry have on us.

The will to power is in all people all the time. Our constitution does not try to change the souls of men. We separate power so the power hungry hold each other in check. The ultimate check on power is for free men to stand their ground and maintain their rights. For 15 centuries the common men of Anglo-Saxon societies have, to the best of there ability done just that.

Not sure I’d say “power.” I think “control” is a better word. Capitalism is based on what we call The Market. We, collectively, are The Market. Yet The Market seems to act independently of us. It often does things we don’t want it to do. It makes some people rich and other people poor, which doesn’t seem fair at all. Sometimes it crashes, making a LOT of people poor. But even though it seems to do just as much harm as good, we – who ARE The Market – act as if we have no control over it. In fact, we act as if this lack of control is why The Market works better than any other system. The Market, we say, has greater wisdom than any one person. It sounds irrational, but we must trust it.

Leftists do not trust The Market. They are afraid of it because it’s irrational and independent. They hate it because it seems to cause poverty and inequality. Since people ARE The Market, they reason, why can’t people CONTROL the market so as to eliminate all the negative things it does? If all the people of The Market got together and agreed to do things a certain way, wouldn’t they be able to prevent crashes, poverty, and inequality?

Since that’s not likely to happen – people being greedy and irrational – how about if the Government took control of The Market? That way, financial experts hired by the Government could make rational decisions about how The Market should behave. Since The Market is us, the Government itself could pass laws to make sure we produced, bought, sold, and traded in a rational manner, ensuring the desired economic and social results. With the experts in charge, we’d have no more crashes, no more poverty, and no more inequality. It would all be rational, completely under control, and perfectly safe. Safety – lack of risk – is the ultimate goal.

“The fundamental paradigm of Communist ideology is guaranteed to have wide appeal: you suffer; your suffering is caused by powerful others; these oppressors must be destroyed.” Leszek Kolakowski

“I am persuaded that a lie grounded in human desire is too powerful for reason to kill.” David Horowitz

“Bad myths can only be driven out by better myths, and unless capitalism can provide a better myth than socialism, the latter will again prevail.” Lee Harris

“Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most. That people are basically good; that honor, courage, and virtue mean everything; that power and money mean nothing; that good always triumphs over evil; and I want you to remember this, that love… true love never dies. Doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. You see, a man should believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing in.” Hub (Second Hand Lions) by Tim McCanlies

Nothing can be easier than arguing with a Marxist. Don’t argue morals, argue history. Marxism has been tried and failed in Russia, China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany Poland, Albania, Yugoslavia and Angola. Currently Marxist governments have brought hunger and misery to Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia and Zimbabwe.

Funny thing about Marxists, though, is their undying faith. All those failed Marxist states? Oh, they were just anomalies. The revolutionaries didn’t do it right. The revolution was hijacked by selfish people or killed off by imperialists. The revolution could never have succeeded in a country like Russia. But THIS TIME is different! This time we’ll learn from the past and get it right.

They’re a bit like the people who calculate the date and time of the Christian Apocalypse.

Except the people who calculate the date and time of Christ’s arrival are crackpots waaay out of mainstream Christian thought and theology, whom the Marxian-dominated media love to hold up as examples of “what Christians think” in order to make Christianity seem like a convention of morons. If the same thing were done to Marxian idiots, they’d be laughed at instead of elected to office and allowed to teach our children.

The Marxist yearning for class warfare is what lies behind most intellectuals’ (and wanna-be-intellectuals’) intense search for racism, sexism, homophobia in every human action. If you can’t get a good poor vs rich battle going in a country where most of us still stubbornly believe opportunity is there for the taking, then you do what you can to drive wedges between other groups.

I call Marxism (and other varieties of leftism) Rich People’s Leftism. It’s designed primarily to help wealthy people who are guilty about their wealth deal with that guilt. They can feel that they are helping the poor because they are Marxists. Only secondarily does Marxism attempt to help poor people, and it does a very bad job of doing that, but no matter, simply being a Marxist is enough to put one on the side of the angels.

I come from a lower-middle-class background, and I used to eat this stuff up, until enough facts got in the way and I bolted. What I call Poor People’s Leftism begins by looking at what poor people actually want, which isn’t equality but getting rich. Ensuring that poor people can get out of poverty easily is the first priority of Poor People’s Leftism.

Not sure about that definition. A lot of people think that the way to get poor people out of poverty most easily is for the government to take money from rich people and give it to the poor people. My impression is that a lot of poor people would like that. But you’re right – that’s not a Marxist solution. I’m not sure what it is.

the battle between free market capitalism versus collectivism is of utmost importance

one of the main failures of the “republicans” in their messaging is the lack of “econ 101 refreshers;” a sort of hayek versus keynes overview

few republican candidates/gurus can even defend the ryan budget on simple capitalistic principles– this is an utter failure– for capitalism and freedom go hand in hand and these features are supposed to be the “bedrock” of the “republican party.”

perhaps the republican strategists should spend a couple days youtubing milton friedman’s vids than forming “circular firing squads” around their potential candidates

I have no doubt now that we are heading for a bloody civil war. The Culture and the Counter-Culture cannot abide with each other. One must eventually destroy the other, and neither will go quietly.

My great fear though is that we will be by that time so coarsened and so darkened in our hearts that we won’t preserve the very things that we are fighting for. I fear pogroms and purges, rule of mob and rule of man, and bloody terror. And hense, out the other side will only be barbarism, darkness, and ignorance.

Marxism excels in the production of gray. Gray buildings, clothing, water, and air can all be found in abundance in Soviet/Marxist societies. There is no value to clean water, air or soil, so you don’t have any. Good looking fruits and vegetables have no value in excess of any others (food items & Californians), so you don’t have them.

Movies and books demonize business people and extol “selfless” bureaucrats.

Speaking of movies and books, I’d like to see how capitalism basher extraordinaire Michael Moore would make his movies without all the products he uses to do that. Or how Noam Chomsky would fly about the world, giving speeches on the horrors of capitalism, without those nasty producers of the copious amenities he uses, from jet planes to fine hotels.

Guilt must drive such individuals, in Moore’s case, it seems to be convolutedly all tied up with his Catholic background. Guilt must be expiated (momentarily, anyway) by drawing attention to themselves & self-righteously speechifying while, personally, indulging themselves to the hilt. (Do you think Michael Moore will ever actually fly to Cuba for some of that wonderful medical care he so grandiosely extols?)

Until Barack Obama drives a Chevy Volt instead of the 8 mpg “Beast” (which got stuck after actually being flown to Ireland to carry him around), I will despise hypocrites such as he, a self-righteous speechifier who would love to see the consumer’s energy costs “necessarily skyrocket”. (He’s getting his wish. He won’t be affected, of course)

Our (Marxist leaning) preachers and teachers in government are hypocrites of the worst order.

Today in Washington D.C. Transportation Secretary Ray Lahood rolled up to a press conference to unveil the Fed’s new Fuel Economy stickers, riding in a 12 mpg SUV. Now, nothing wrong with driving an SUV, but this story has a bit of a French Revolution theme to it: instead of let them eat cake, let them drive it. Lahood’s comment: “we’re not just sitting around waiting for high gasoline prices to come down…” as if a sticker is going to drop our prices at the pump!

Very good points. The people who push Marxism do not intend to live under the conditions created by its tenets. Do Raul and Fidel live in a lean-to on the beach? No. They live in a presidential palace in Havana. I bet Fidel even has a tailor to custom-make his camouflage suits and sweat-pants/sweatshirt outfits. Meanwhile, the Cuban people live in poverty. This is the difference between capitalism and Marxism/socialism/communism. Capitalism offers opportunity to lift yourself up; Marxism takes that opportunity away. Marxism wants to level the playing field. Everyone must be the same. The only way to accomplish this equality of sameness is to bring the top down, since you can’t bring the dolts in society up to the level of the shining stars. You must deny excellence in all endeavors and bring everyone down to mediocrity or even lower. Marxism and its offspring crush the human spirit and kill motivation, creativity, innovation, and entrepeneurship. Meanwhile, the elite in this system live the high life and enjoy the riches. Every college student should have to read F.A. Hayek’s book, “The Road to Serfdom,” as a requirement for graduation.

“Clearly Marx never taught a child to cook. You start with raw materials worth something, you spend hours on cooking (and putting out small fires), and the result is, more often than not, a mess that has to be thrown away. ”

Post modern Marxists or Marxians or or those suffering from Marximania…or whatever, are as interested in the workings of economics as a snail is in in Indy car racing.

They can’t do it, it goes against their nature, they don’t understand it and therefore it is meaningless to their lives.

Today’s useful imbeciles and those who worsen the damage by pretending to hold an oxymoronic erudition and air of superiority while wallowing in their idiocy, are interested in two things: Class warfare (lamely disguised as “struggle”) and naked hypocrisy.

Post modern leftists who worship at the altar of useful idiocy are clowns piling out of a Volkswagen. The act ends when they run out of clowns. So, they have to find more and more people to put those size 52 shoes on, round red noses and grease paint. In order to be be-knighted in Marxism, one has to beclown oneself.

When class “struggle” seems to be naturally dissipating …it must be stoked…as a fire is stoked. When you run out of “strugglers” they must be invented.

Post modern Marxism also wallows in naked hypocrisy. There is no deux ex machina at the end of this nonsensical idiocy. It’s a money grab at the “top”…an emotional Ponzi scheme…where the first ones in get all the goodies and the lesser idiots are useful only to keep feeding the top layers.

Marxism is multi-layered marketing of an idea that doesn’t work, a product that is snake oil and makes promises it never intends to deliver. The trick to keeping it going…is to seize the mantle of “goodness” and hold on with both hands, peer pressuring the lowest rung idiots into believing that everyone who doesn’t sell the snake oil is “bad”.

All the “justice” BS yakked about by the current crop of Washington élites, from climate justice to food justice (Michelle Obama’s favorite) to your dog’s right to bark justice (ok, I made that one up) is code for cultural Marxism.

Both communism and the New Left are alive and thriving here in America. They favor code words: tolerance, social justice, economic justice, peace, reproductive rights, sex education and safe sex, safe schools, inclusion, diversity, and sensitivity. All together, this is Cultural Marxism disguised as multiculturalism.

“Marxist theory is now applied to all those fields and more. (In the 70s, in Portugal, I studied it in history, sociology, economics, literature, art, and philosophy. They were only waiting for the proper choreography to teach Marxist interpretive dance in Phys Ed).”

Sadly, reality will not be mocked — North Korea has produced the missing piece to complete the Marxist cultural hegemony:

“[North Korea]’s KCNA news agency took the time yesterday to remind its citizens of the terpsichorean skills of the secretive state’s leader.

“Twenty years have elapsed since leader Kim Jong-il published a famous work, Theory of Dancing Art,” KCNA reported.

“The work formulates the distinctive character and basic mission of the dancing art and the orientation of its development newly elucidated by the juche idea.” Since the work was published, “many famous dance pieces (have been] created and the dance notation brought to perfection”, KCNA said.

North Korea is involved in a standoff with the South after it shelled a southern island last week, killing four people. Perhaps with this in mind, KCNA gave as examples performances of Army and People United in One Mind around the Leader and the dances I Can Still See Victory in the Revolution! and We Will Never Give up Even an Inch of Our Land.

“Thanks to Kim Jong-il’s outstanding idea and theory, the dancing art of Korea has developed into a juche-based, revolutionary one based on national dancestyle and the people’s life.””

For years, a number of non-fiction writers and useless philosophers have tried to figure out how to make it illegal to resell books and music CDs.

The image that haunts me most from the Soviet purges is that of the hundreds of thousands of starving children who roamed about the countryside till they died. It was a capital offence merely to be born into the wrong class during the class wars, and no punishment was too severe for a toddler born into that wrong class. Born guilty.

EXACTLY, I thought of Yuri the other night. Just take a look at some of the crass displays on the final American Idol I’m no prude but the envelope keeps getting pushed, the fifteen year old girls all looked at my husband and I as that couple rolled around the stake mimicking sex on the stage and young girls sashayed their buts all over the stage. I’m no prude believe me but is this not supposed to be family viewing. Cultural Marxism it’s a cancer

Catholics don’t have a lock on the original sin idea It’s intrinsic to Christianity. As I’ve told my kids, it used to be a person said, “I must do it, because it it right.” Now, it seems, most people say, “It must be right, because I do it.” Marx hated the idea of religion of any kind, especially Christianity, because it placed “value” on each individual’s soul and life. Can’t have that!

Well, certainly not me.
I believe?
What is this, some mystic appeal to magic?
Marx was on to a painful fact of life, just as the prophets of the bible, Jesus, and many more. Without a governing principle of justice, the strong will prey on the weak.
We need a free market governed by law and order, not some morons who insist that acquiring wealth will somehow magically, (no one has ever been able to say precisely how ) provide a just society. Perhaps you conveniently have forgotten that the borders of free nations are secured not by the rich but by the very people you are so sure must live lives of endless labor to provide you with your happy, and safe society.
When will you people struggle to use your brains instead of just aping one another about the problems of Marxism?
Oh, and just to be clear, a “Revolution” by a bunch of privileged, High on Dope college kids, won’t help the poor either.

Spoken as someone who really doesn’t understand how the free market works Ozzy. Markets are self-correcting. This is not to say we don’t need governments. As Dr. Pournelle once said, the biggest enemy of capitalism is a real greedy, amoral capitalist. But what you don’t seem to get Ozzy is Marxism simply does not work. It never has and it never will.

I work very very hard for may money. I don’t make much. The wolves are perpetually at my door. This is not the fault of people who have more than I do. Nor is it my boss’s fault — nor yet the fault of some faceless corporation (which evil corporation it must be noted provides jobs to thousands of people). No, the reason I’m perpetually broke is because of choices I have made. I chose to get into a line of work that I love but pays for beans. I chose to get in over my head a couple of times. I am now choosing to slowly work my way out of the situation. I don’t need government help to do it and I certainly don’t need artificial wage increases which do nothing but cause inflation and drops in real buying power.

You see, Ozzy, government interference in the markets does nothing but screw things up. So yes, most of the people here are fans of laissez-faire
capitalism — because it works.

To effectively combat Marxism, we should study not only its weak points, but also its strong points. Marxism is about the conflict between the haves and have-nots. Ironically, those of us who oppose Marxism, and support the Tea Party movement, find ourselves in a class struggle, too: the struggle between regular Americans who see themselves as being enslaved, and the Big Government allied with corrupt Big Business, who have been trying to turn us into slaves.

My point is, we should not turn this class straggle into warfare. We should look at (most) progressives not as evil and stupid enemies, but as decent, but mistaken people – because most of them don’t actually want to rob and enslave their fellow citizens. We need to identify those who DO want to rob and enslave – which is not just politicians. It’s also those who finance the politicians. It’s not just Obama – it’s also George Soros and his clients.

This country was not overtaken by pot-smoking hippies by themselves. It was overtaken by some very rich and powerful people, who wanted even more wealth and power, at our expense – and who used Marxism to divide and conquer us. Now it’s time for them to taste their own medicine.

My point is, we should not turn this class straggle into warfare. We should look at (most) progressives not as evil and stupid enemies, but as decent, but mistaken people – because most of them don’t actually want to rob and enslave their fellow citizens.

It is impossible to look into another man’s heart. A collectivist can have either the most noble or the basest of intentions, but the effect of a collectivist’s exercising his franchise is always robbery and enslavement of his fellow citizens.

If what you say about collectivists is true, I am bound to make mistakes no matter how I treat them. I will make my mistakes on the side of caution. Collectivists are evil, and they are my enemies.

FTL-
“It is impossible to look into another man’s heart” – this is a great point, because the consequences of one’s actions often have nothing to do with one’s intentions.
So, instead of angrily arguing with rank-and-file Lefties, I want to find who they are serving. I want to expose their generals, who are actually quite often capitalists, sometimes hiding behind individualistic rhetoric. Look what Soros preaches through his university – you might be surprised.

“We should look at (most) progressives not as evil and stupid enemies, but as decent, but mistaken people – because most of them don’t actually want to rob and enslave their fellow citizens.”

Yes they do.

Only a tiny percentage of them are idealists. Very very few individuals operate out of anything other than self interest. Even most supposedly high-minded progressives are just trying to get other people to pay for their seemingly egalitarian fantasies.

There are only three categories of “progressives”: the commissars who care only about their own wealth and power, the proletariat, who care only about picking the other guy’s pockets, and a tiny tiny slice of kumbaya librarian types, who are just run-of-the-mill fools. If they weren’t spreading their legs for the commisars, they would be spreading their legs for the snake-oil saleman on the corner. And even the librarian types are careful to make sure their dreams don’t drain their own pocketbooks.

“Who is with me?” Well, I am. But to pose Lenin’s question: What Is To Be Done?

Our Constitution establishes broad rules for governing ourselves which focus on restricting the power of government because of the Founders’ deep understanding of human nature — which never changes.

Marxism focuses on the structure of society — which is always changing. Marxism is a static analysis, empty of intellectual content as you point out above. Because its aim is to change the structure of society — by violence preferably; by subversion if necessary — Marxism attracted Totalitarians whose first concern was achieving the power to change society. When they discovered they couldn’t change human nature, they settled for the power.

In his early critique of Marxism, Jan Waclaw Machajski, a radical critic of the Russian intelligentsia and socialism “made a fundamental discovery: socialism, and particularly Marxism, represented the class interests not of the workers but of a rising new class. . .privileged employees of the capitalist state: lawyers, journalists, scholars.” (See Marshall S. Shatz, Jan Waclaw Machajski, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989, p.32). There we have it.

The fundamental basis of politics is the answer to three questions: Who is Us? Who is Them? and, Who’s in charge? or in Lenin’s phrasing, Who can do what to Whom? Over the course of the last century or so, a self-anointed, self-appointed social, intellectual and political elite has seized and transformed government to the point at which they think they can do to us pretty much anything they want to. (See Angelo M. Codevilla, The Character of Nations, Basic Books, 2009, and The Ruling Class, Beaufort Books, 2010)

What Is To Be Done? The choice is fight, flight or submit. If we choose Fight, look at the recent example of Wisconsin. It’s not going to be easy. Rather than turn this into a lengthy exposition of a political program, I’ll just end with this: The Rule of Judges Must End, and we must Defund the Left starting with academia.

The reason that Marxism continues to exist is that it is the best con ever devised by the ruling classes. The old cons don’t work that well anymore (except for muslims)…magic, secret knowledge, divinity, devine rights, aristocratic priviledge. So they invented class warfare, ironically, to implement total class dominance. All of the chaotic, stupid, contradictory, uninformed, spider-web razzmajazz is irrelevant. It’s just what the academics do to fulfill their role in the con. You might as will argue with the Koran. It’s senseless and arguing only legitimizes it. Just saying the word marxist is enough. It’s a con, not a philosophy.

The purpose, the ENTIRE purpose, is to fan jealousy and trick ignorent people into supporting the wannabe ruling class pied pipers whose own purpose is the furthest thing in the world from helping the fools who salivate to pick the other guy’s pocket.

proreason….without a long dissertation, Marx/Marxism is a premise convoluded by endless contradictions. The premise of all the populist politcal and social philosophers is rather simple when one takes the time to remove all the deep complex smoke screen fluff. Neither socialism, anarchism or democracies/capitalism are void of a ‘ruling class’ over their majority sub classes. The only thing at issue is that of economies…who do they belong to. The ruling class or the people…or a combination! A government who does not own or regulate the economies is a limited government reliant upon the people who own and make the economies work. Sound familiar to any document?

Forget all that social justice and social ‘equality’ junk of Marxism in any evolutionary forms. Its a lie….a mind control psyops strategy of selling points to influence the masses and gain their ignorant support. And, my, my, how it has worked throught the worlds history and the past century in America!

All this deep philosophical intellectualizing of Marx/Marxism is _________________ (fill in the blank). Its all about who shall weild the ownership and power over economies and societies…..the people or a ruling class (government)

All the more recent evolutions of socialism over the past couple of decades are yet more psyops smoke screens i.e., democratic socialism, capitalist socialism, etc. The end game objective never changes!

Americans have and continue to systematically and systemically surrender the most perfect form of government and economy in the world to the followers of Marx and his sick philosophy of socialism.

E.Mach`s doctrine of the economy of thought works! All false theories are simple and attractive hence: Golden past and terrible future,collectivism in all aspects-collective paradise-socialism national(nazi`s) and international(commies`),racism.
Marxism is the most primitive form of collectivism and the most dangerous hence.

Marx watches the history of the greatest revolutions ever happened, the scientific revolution and the industrial revolution. These will change the world forever, freeing the human beings from poverty and disease.

What is his comment ? That all that is bloody “exploitation”.

And today’s idiots, who live in conditions which NO King of France has ever dreamed of…repeat that capitalism is “bloody exploitation”.

…it wasn’t just Karly Marx (aka Mordechai) the idiot alone in this messing up; it was his contemporary moronic comrade too, Charlie Darwin. BOTH idiots did this Civilization, Western Civilization that is, in. Both have equal share in derailing this unique and noble endeavor of humanity. They were the enemy within that killed it.

The late 21st century Historian (if there will be anyone allowed to freely write about the History of Western Civ) will chronicle this monumental destruction for the ages by those two Idiots.

And Marx got it from Hegel who got it from Kant who got it from Augustine who got it from Plotinus who got it from Christ who got it from Plato (who got it from the Greek Mystery Religions, e.g., cult of Dionysus, etc., who got it from the Oriental east, e.g., Indus, etc. and yada).

“The best ordered state will be one in which the largest number of persons … most nearly resembles a single person. The first and highest form of the State … is a condition in which the private and the individual is altogether banished from life …” (Plato’s _Republic_ & _Laws_ c. 370 BCE)

And Marx got it from Hegel who got it from Kant who got it from Augustine who got it from Plotinus who got it from Christ who got it from Plato (who got it from the Greek Mystery Religions, e.g., cult of Dionysus, etc., who got it from the Oriental east, e.g., Indus, etc., and yada).

“The best ordered state will be one in which the largest number of persons … most nearly resembles a single person. The first and highest form of the State … is a condition in which the private and the individual is altogether banished from life …” (Plato’s _Republic_ & _Laws_ c. 370 BCE)

Christ didn’t borrow from myster cults or Eastern or Greek philosophy. Some of the later (400 years or so) Christians started to mix that in (hence Augustine, for example). Don’t conflate the confused “followers” with the Founder

Actually, business owners’ profits stem from two sources: customers’ willingness to pay to NOT have to produce on their own what the business produces for them and the owners’ compensation for the risk they took in starting the business. This is why companies with novel products or services always earn larger profits than companies which are more mature. The founding event (and the risk thereof) are closer in time and the novelty means fewer competitors.

All this Marxist drivel about “workers’ surplus value” and “labor theory of value” are ridiculous. What creates value is successful risk-taking. Marx only dealt with an analysis of firms that were up and running and seemingly enduring and COMPLETELY flubbed the analysis of risk. As such, his entire theory is USELESS. The sooner people realize this, the better.

I intended my statement to be humorous, but it is probably too deadpan.

Marx of course blamed employers for becoming wealthy from the work of their employees. But, he didn’t account for people not having any work if employers are not there to hire them.

So, it seems that employers are (supposedly) exploiting those who work for them, but are (strangely enough) not exploiting those who are not employed. I bet the unemployed would rather be exploited in that way.

The idea of political correctness having some provenance in Marxism is an interesting thought as is the idea of “folk beliefs”, urban myths, false narratives.

The idea that Marxism has cornered the market of the idea of a folk belief isn’t compelling for me; just because a thing resembles another doesn’t place a copyright on Marxism’s use of it.

I don’t really buy into the idea that our nations’s founders were dunderheads who created a government basically based on trumped up slogans. Rather their ideas of government to me were shrewd observations based on very real struggles in England for generations between the idea of a democracy and the idea of the divine right of kings. Also, separation of church and state wasn’t something they heard at a rock concert in Nimes. These were men who created new well thought out and reasoned paradigms for government that in turn became slogans, not the other way around.

False narratives or folk myths also, to me, when applied to one’s own culture need a certain amount of overweening pride and plain stupidity to gain real traction. An example is the Byzantine explanations for why Egypt’s loss in the 1973 War with Israel wasn’t really a loss or the false history of the Palestinian Arabs where they maintain hordes of Jews came along and so “more than 700,000 Palestinian civilians were made homeless overnight” as Sharmine Narwani maintained in the Huffington Post on May 17, 2011.

Glib comparisons that say only 20 Israeli’s have died from 8,000 rockets from Gaza as if inaccurate rocket fire is a moral position contributes to urban myths.

Black Americans viewing slavery as a particularly white supremacist act is another false narrative that buys into pride and stupidity. To believe such a thing one must believe slavery is done for different reasons by every one in history but when Europeans did it to Africans. African on African slavery is somehow different. We’re talking about man’s inhumanity to man but this doesn’t serve the narrative some wish to buy into.

That Gordian Knot of arcane stupidity that is political correctness may resemble Marx and share some of its same concerns but inheriting broad ideas isn’t inheriting an ideology and political correctness is an ideology that has its own imperative uniquely American and born out of American history and not European.

Our debased PC ideology which derides common sense is born from a sense of unease with the story of America which began with the Beat Generation in the 1950s and mixed in with the Civil Rights movement which soon followed. The tenets of political correctness on the liberal political Left derive their origins from these and not from some shared and entirely accidental values of Marxism. Disliking America because of its “sins” is not Marxism but cheap hippie nonsense.

For me political correctness is based on cheap psychology and false assumptions that rise to the level of a religious faith since the Left’s view and use of the phrase “all men are created equal” is a false one and so in every sense a slogan based on a glib as opposed to articulate view of American history.

Here’s Obama’s view:

“They want to give people like me a two hundred thousand dollar tax cut that’s paid for by asking thirty three seniors to each pay six thousand dollars more in health costs?”

That’s not based on a sophisticated ideology but a false Robin Hood scenario about a connection that in fact doesn’t exist. It’s willful stupidity since some 10% of the people pay 70% of our taxes and the bottom half pays virtually nothing. Spending 20 years in a Trinity Church then run by Rev. Wright and based on the Black Liberation theology of James Cone, Marxist or no, is not a template for nuance but for simplistic idiocy.

Marx was one of those fools who think gov’t can be like an equation that denies human failings, our Constitution acknowledges those failings and set out to nip them in the bud. Not all opinions are equally valid – in this case, one is stupid and the other smart. Calling something “folk Marxism” doesn’t mean it has anything to do with Marxism. We’re quite capable of being morons on our own.

In the 70s, in Portugal, I studied [Marxist theory] in history, sociology, economics, literature, art, and philosophy.

This is very interesting. I went to high school in the country with the largest communist party in the West during the Cold War, ie Italy. In Italian schools, politics was strictly verboten. The only course where Marx was mentioned was philosophy, and our philosophy teacher was a member of the Italian Communist Party … but when the time came to teach Marx, he took a leave of absence because of political commitments, and his replacement (believe it or not) was a Catholic priest. (Maybe my memory is faulty, but as I remember, both teachers were objective to a fault.)

Anyway, all of us, Marxists and anti-Marxists, thought we knew what Marx said, long before Marx came up in class. Not that any of us had actually read Marx: it was just in the air.

The reason why I still think that we understood Marx in high school better than Ivy League “intellectuals” do today, is the concept of “Marxian” atonement. That was completely alien to the mindset of Italian Marxists when I knew them: they took it for granted that everybody acts in their class interest. Or, to paraphrase Karl Popper (The Open Society): TRUE Marxists believe in their own IMmorality.
Only vulgar-Marxist charlatans who believe in their own moral superiority.

You can teach Marxism without ever, once, mentioning the word “Marx.” Quite easily. Just as, in an earlier day, a certain teacher said, “I don’t care if they don’t let me teach Evolution in science. I’ll teach Evolution during English, I’ll teach Evolution during Math, I’ll teach Evolution during every single class. All Evolution. I just won’t call it that.” Because a word was never mentioned, doesn’t mean the philosophies and “truisms” weren’t being taught. Which, I rather think, was Mrs. Hoyt’s point – it was in *everything*.

Yeah, sorry to be sarcastic, but what makes you think that Marxism was not in everything your teachers taught you? what makes you think that Marxism was not in everything your parents taught you?
I have the answer to that: I have read political books written before Marx, and I know the difference. Do you?

Yes. In several different languages. I used to read my kids’ text books and would point out what is history (or whatever the subject was supposed to be) and what is agenda and propaganda. Now they show me, because they have learned to discern.

Thank you for your reply, and congratulations to your kids. If you are still reading this, perhaps you can advise me on how to spot propaganda, because this is a subject in which one can never know all what there is to know.

Speaking for myself, the most useful way to spot propaganda that I know is Marxist class analysis (as I understand it): any political idea that is in the interest of the ruling class, that advocates an increase in the power of the ruling class, is ipso facto suspicious. (Though not always wrong.)
In other words, I find that the best antidote against Marxism, and statism in general, is a Marxist concept. It’s homeopathy, I guess.

Another question that I ask myself, when I read a political argument, is this: does the argument rely on the implicit assumption that people respond to incentives? if not, then it’s propaganda.

We are being stolen from and plundered every day. Just wait until they confiscate our 401k savings for ‘the greater good’ [i.e. to try and fix their f*ck-ups].

Think of your money as clothing/food/fuel and hopefully an eventual retirement, rather than just “$$$”. Now, imagine some government a-hole comes into your home each month and assesses how much food is in your pantry, how much gas you have, clothing and other necessities and takes a portion of it to give to someone else clear across the country (or even to some other country). You have no choice or say as to who or what it even goes to. You’re just left there feeling robbed at gun-point with no recourse.

Good one, Sarah! The thing is, resisting capitalism is like resisting air. It’s what happens naturally where there is ecomonic freedom. Idealists like Marx are only happy when they’re unhappy, so naturally they have to resist the air they breathe. All utopians are sentimentalists, especially when it comes to themselves. They always begin by saying man is totally orrupt in his current state, but all he has to do is neagate it, and presto! he becomes a saint. Doesn’t matter if it’s Plato or Calvin or Descartes or Marx or Nietzsche. Moral vanity blinds them to the real condition of man.

To Army of Davids.
Marx would prefer single payer to Obamacare, but would realize that Obamacare is a good way to screw up and socialize our present health care enough to make single payer someday politically feasable, which is also the reason Obama and the dems supported obamacare.

In the course of writing my book, Killers Without Conscience, I’ve had to re-think a few things after reading Chantal Delsol’s Icarus Fallen and The Unlearned Lessons of the Twentieth Century. Going to take another pass through the two titles to really get the complete gist of what she’s up to. I can’t agree with all of her ideas regarding human nature and the fate of Man, but her ideas and insights fairly leap off of every page. Highly, highly recommended for anyone who wants a deeper insight into our modern times. For example, Delsol, in her Unlearned Lessons… understands what animates much of the tortured delusional thinking and pretzel logic the Left employs:

“Vital resistance and resentment are the two main responses to the events of 1989. Vital resistance: the mind realizes its mistake – it admits, for example, that nationalization of the means of production does not produce a happy society, but rather laziness and constant shortages; it refuses, however, to let go of the idea because of its passionate attachment to it. Existence – adventures, friendships, successes – is nourished and permeated by this belief to such an extent that the belief becomes an identity; the individual cannot renounce it without committing a kind of symbolic suicide. No one can admit… that his existence reflects the echo of a failure.”

In other words, no one who has championed the ideas of collectivism in any of its forms wants to admit that the premises upon which one has constructed their entire raison d’être is an empty, shrieking fraud. This goes a long way towards explaining why we still see excuses made for the monstrous crimes of the totalitarian monsters who haunted much of the last century.

Getting back to Killers Without Conscience, the path I’ve taken with the book so far is that there are two streams of thought, two memes, really that converged with disastrous results in the last two hundred years (a period of time that Delsol also happens to agree with).

First of all, we have a set of ideas that lead to what I characterize as the dehumanization of humanity. The signal authors of those ideas : Marx. Freud, B.F. Skinner and Nietzsche. Sure, you couldeasily name a hundre more, but these four, I believe are the belweathers. We find examples of their contemporaries in the likes of Emanuel Ezekiel, John Holdren and Cass Sunstein. Not to put too fine a point on it, the main recurrent theme in their works is that humans are nothing more than things, animals or machines. Some of them have even said as much. We can all understand the downside of that particular view. The history of the last century alone is proof enough, I think.

Nietzsche’s role in this particular stream of thought is both remarkable and crucial. To sum up a fair amount of research, the notion of God – the force that moves men and nations, the source of our conscience and our notions of right and wrong – was increasingly seen as an invention, a fantasy – and also as an impediment to human ‘progress’ by these modern thinkers. But Nietzsche saw God not as an invention, but as a casualty. He wrote in 1886: “The greatest event in recent times – that ‘God is Dead,’ that the belief in the Christian God is no longer tenable – is beginning to cast its first shadows upon Europe.” The Christian God, he wrote, would no longer stand in the way of the development of the New Man who Nietzsche said would be ‘beyond good and evil’. Nietzsche knew that in Europe, the decline of religion as a guide to conscience and morality would leave a huge vacuum. Who or what would fill that vacuum?

As Nietzsche saw it, the most likely candidate would be what he called the ‘Will to Power,’ which he felt offered a better and more persuasive explanation of human behavior than either Marx or Freud. In place of religious belief, there would be secular ideology. The very concept of good and evil would be discarded as the product of weak and inferior minds. Our notions of good and evil would disappear in the wake of what he characterized as the ‘transvaluation of all values.’

But above all, Nietzsche believed that the Will to Power would produce a new kind of messiah, uninhibited by religious sanctions, without moral restraint of any kind, and with an unappeasable and insatiable appetite for controlling mankind.

Then we have the uniquely destructive meme dedicated to the undermining of culture in order to weaken it, destroy it, and replace it with a totalitarian system. All as proposed by Antonio Gramsci in his call for the ‘long march through the institutions.’ This idea has been echoed, amplified and modified over the decades by such as Herbert Marcuse (repressive tolerance), Saul Alinsky, and the Cloward-Piven duo. The aims of this particular set of monsters are best exemplified by a banner I once saw at a leftist-anarchist demonstration – Burn the old world to reveal the new. Eerily echoed in a line from The Dark Knight: “Some men just want to watch the world burn…”

And some men, driven by the geas of the will to power would rather rule in hell from atop a heap of rubble and corpses than leave the rest of us alone to live in peace and prosperity. A new feudalism (or worse) and a world lit only by fire will suit them just fine as long as they believe that they will be the ones in the high castle. Most of us dead. The rest of us in chains. Their vision demands it.

My research leads me to believe that the convergence of these two very bad – and downright evil – lines of thought, now running as memes within Western civilization have provided the perfect vehicle, the perfect operating environment for an even worse outbreak of ruin and slaughter than we have seen in the last century. Crossing those streams, as Dr. Spengler once said to Dr. Venkman, would be very bad. And so it has been. That convergence plays directly into the hands of the will-to-power driven monsters that I’ve characterized as Killers Without Conscience.

Worst of all, and if history’s any indicator, what’s coming as a result of that convergence has the potential to make the worst excesses of the last century look like a Girl Scout picnic by comparison.

Another example, in addition to your child cooking one, is having your appendix removed by a qualified surgeon, or the village granny. Both would expend the same labor, and thus produce the same value according to Marx, but I know which one I would normally want to pay for (except in the very rare case where the village granny was really good, and the surgeon was really bad).

If you wanted to calculate value by totalling inputs, a somewhat better formulai would be:
Value = (materials + labor + capital + distribution + (entrepenurial ability and organization) + technology) vs demand for that item.
With the value of each component in the equation being adjusted up or down by its quality in addition to its quantity.

But, instead of that hugely complicated formula, you can just follow Adam Smith, and say value is the price that a typical willing buyer and seller are both ready to agree on.

Hey, looks like the leftist sites have started posting a link to Mrs. Hoyt’s essay! You can tell because it’s obvious Frizz here didn’t read the essay and is mouthing something somebody else said. Sort of like … oh, I dunno … a worker drone doing the job assigned by a “superior”, maybe? Hope you got your lollypop.

When societies are shaped by philosophers, economists, historians, and sociologists those societies are eventually doomed…though ‘legitmate’ historians can certainly have value to any society. Great societies rise when unencumbered human nature is allowed to exist. Examples! Supply and demand economics is a natural occurance if not encumbered by idiots. Research and development again, is a matter of human nature, evolution and environmental necessity. Real wisdom comes [only] through ones own failures and cannot be manufactured or originated independently by philosophers, historians and sociologists.

To be blunt….PhD’s of what is called liberal arts today, have never risen any nation or society up to greatness.

Thanks Marc! Always good to draw an ‘indeed’ from you. It’s only taken me a lifetime to understand that the great american project was all about the exceptionalism and rewards of human nature if not encumbered by idiots…those social, political and economic philosopher kind of folks.

Excellent takedown of the arguments made by Marxists, although I have to disagree with the effectiveness of targeting specifics of Marxism. You can’t argue with a Marxist using logic, because their belief in Marxism doesn’t hinge on facts or logic, rather it hinges on their emotional needs. A Marxist is merely an individual that has found an ideology that allows him to justify feelings that had previously been taboo, not an individual that has come to those feelings based on his analysis of the ideology. A Marxist’s emotional dependence on the ideology creates a subset of hidden beliefs that the individual attributes to Marx, or to the truth of existence as a whole. The arguments they use are a framework to defend the ideology, but also to obfuscate their emotional attachments.

Every self-described Marxist with whom I’ve come in contact has a set of beliefs that may or may not be part of the canon. These individuals believe in:
1. strong static separations between classes enforced by specific groups,
2. finite wealth.

The first belief stems from an emotional need for an individual to justify their current economic or emotional state. There’s proof to this statement historically, but a moment for the theory. When one is suffering in self-imposed poverty, they can either accept responsibility for their state, or attempt to project the guilt onto a third party. The strong barrier belief is imposed to justify the argument that the individual would fail even if he did try to work himself out of poverty, allowing him to avoid the difficult task of leaving poverty through personal effort. The idea of static wealth is generally employed by a guilty conscience looking for a way to construe the suspected barrier party’s increase in wealth as a form of theft. Thus the guilt at one’s own poverty is projected as malicious restraint exercised by the barrier party. These two beliefs serve as both an excuse for one’s poverty, and a justification for the violence or theft that is to follow. Part of the individual’s desires were always for violence or theft, but mental gymnastics were needed to assuage guilt and justify the action.

Most Marxists have never questioned whether the ideology is wrong. They can’t emotionally, because it opens some uncomfortable doors. If my statement regarding emotional dependence on Marxism is correct, then what does it imply? It describes the motivation of a Marxist, and using that you can predict actions. First, since someone with those emotional needs seeks out ideologies that justify their actions, they will seek out those that preach such ideologies. They’ll cling to anyone willing to tell them that their current state is the fault of others. This allows a third entrant to the game. The new individual is generally charismatic, and may or may not truly believe in the ideology (and if they believe, they may change their minds later but still pimp the ideology). This leader will motivate the believers, organize them against their target, then declare war. This war can be an intellectual guerrilla war (war of ideas and indoctrination) or a classical war fought by soldiers out of the rising proletariat.

Now, if these Marxists are correct in their assumptions, then the demise or disappearance of the suspect party will lead to an economic boom. However if these individuals are wrong (and the capitalist idea is correct), then they’ll become poorer than before, having destroyed some of the productive parts of society. This increase in poverty creates a cognitive dissonance that is only resolved by either admitting that one is wrong, or throwing oneself even further into delusions of victimhood. The weak individual looks to the leader to direct him. The leader, not wanting to admit failure, casts another group as the villain that usurped the role left behind by the original villain. Accepting that one is responsible for theft and murder is difficult, so the deluded individual accepts this redirection easily. Having once accepted such redirection to avoid guilt the individual becomes incredibly malleable, allowing him to accept any target at the whim of the leader.

The above generates a cycle of destruction that ends when the individuals upholding it are either destroyed, or when enough of these individuals admit their faults such that they can restrain further actions by those that cannot admit as much. Some of those involved, burdened by a sense of sudden guilt gained from acceptance, commit suicide.

All of this happens if my theory about emotional dependence on victimization is correct. I wrote an outline for this topic, then a year later learned about the Holodomor. The murder and destruction of the kulaks follows this pattern almost to the letter.

The assault on Western values is the intellectual guerrilla warfare tactic of the Marxist. Western values give us a context that is fatal to Marxist arguments, so these values will come under attack. At some level Marxists knows they are wrong, but their emotional dependence on the ideology causes them to lash out at anything that threatens their delusion. That is why history is re-written and that is why any organization that encourages individual responsibility over group responsibility becomes a target.

Marx did not think that production would always be “massive and labor-intensive.” He expected the labor percentage of production to decline over the long term, creating a greater and greater “surplus of capital.” This makes me suspicious of your claim that you’ve studied Marxism.

::snort:: Looks like the liberals have linked this article with an out of context “quote.” Because anybody who’d actually *read* Mrs. Hoyt’s article would know *exactly* how much she’s studied Marxism.

Lin W — I don’t understand. I don’t think I took the statement out of context, and I’m not a liberal. If you have a real criticism of what I said, you should have made it understandable, but you should still do so now. I’m all ears.

Mrs. Hoyt was taught Marxism at school (lower grades) and studied Marism in college. She wrote, quite clearly, “(In the 70s, in Portugal, I studied it in history, sociology, economics, literature, art, and philosophy. They were only waiting for the proper choreography to teach Marxist interpretive dance in Phys Ed). Because of its many permutations, and how it has been interpreted, it would take me a small tome to take Marx to the woodshed properly and cut through the Gordian knot Marxists have woven around his thought. (These disciples now, like a restaurant changing its name after a case of food poisoning, call themselves Marxian, instead of Marxist.)”

Later she says she is going to be simplistic, because she doesn’t have the room in this venue to “write tomes.”

For you to say, *after* supposedly reading the above, about one “simplistic” remark of hers, “This makes me suspicious of your claim that you’ve studied Marxism” is, indeed, snort-worthy.

I say again, to make that statement, you obviously haven’t read the essay. I am deeply sorry I said you were a liberal. I should have said you are most likely a public-school educated progressive. Whose blog did you see the quote in?

I am with you Ms Hoyt. And yes, unlike many Marxists I have read Marx, Engels, and others of their ilk. Engels defined the achievements of Marx like this (I highlight some of his words in bold):

Just as Darwin discovered the law of development or organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.

But that is not all. Marx also discovered the special law of motion governing the present-day capitalist mode of production, and the bourgeois society that this mode of production has created. The discovery of surplus value suddenly threw light on the problem, in trying to solve which all previous investigations, of both bourgeois economists and socialist critics, had been groping in the dark.

I remember reading this with admiration–forty something years ago–I never quite became a Marxist but these kinds of introductions to the BIG GUY prompted me to find his work and read it eagerly. He never quite convince me but don’t be too quick to think of young me as a brilliant student of philosophy, after all at that time I believed that pizza was one of the major food groups. Yet I went through the whole thing. A foreign language quickly fading from my tired head, and almost half a century separate me from the boy that patiently read and tried to understand all that nonsense. One part I remember was that letter to Jenny (daughter) where KM says something about going to the theater to see a representation of some Greek tragedy. He was surprised that the audience could be so obviously moved by a piece of theater written so long ago. He comments something to the effect that the “meta-historical values in culture” have to be explained away. Otherwise the whole material dialectic system he had devised would go to the dogs. That particular problem was a bit too much to understand at a time. So I took some notes and went to the Marxists demanding an explanation. I am so sorry that this was towards the end of his “complete works” because if I had asked around for an explanation earlier I could have saved myself many hours of reading the whole bl00dy stuff. May be someone knows this passage and can quite it here. I have not been able to find it with Google.

I went with my rookie question to all the learned Marxists I knew at the time. Jay Leno could have paid a lot of money to have the video of my brief interviews (pretty much like the “Jay Walking” segments of today.) Some of the most daring tried to bull$hit their way out of it. Well… I said that I did not know much philosophy then but I definitely knew bull$hit so it was easy to discard those “explanations.” The others for the most part answer with something like a “the whah?” while giving me a perplexed look.

I grew up to be a perfectly good and productive individual in total ignorance of why an Aeschylus play could put KM’s theories in mortal peril but eventually I understood his preoccupation. Of course if history is nothing but a succession of hungry and horny hordes competing for food and viable piece of booty; if culture, religion, customs, and four o’clock tea are mere constructions derived form economic circumstance; there is no way a two-thousand year old soap opera is going to touch the emotions of the Duchess of Kirkcaldy. But it did that night when KM took his bearded fat face to Covent Garden to see that piece.

In my generation I saw four kids the economic descendants of mill workers of Liverpool take the sounds and gestures of a kind of music (developed by Africans, Celts and Germans in the lands between Appalachia and the Mississippi delta) and put it into the heads and hearts of every young man and woman in the planet regardless of class. One of the unknown consequences of what the Beatles started was the creation of an industry so profitable that it may have slowed down the fall of the British Pound for a decade — I am not including the sales of Corduroy(TM) pants, silly Beatle boots, Vox amplifiers, and Ludwig drum sets

One of the songs I heard from them (1968?) was strangely athwart the ideas of the time:

“But if come carrying pictures of Chairman Mao
You ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow.”

That’s how the Beatles helped me understand Marx’s anxieties and made me a Capitalist.

Interesting writing. It is my understanding that Marx developed theories, and made some money by selling the ideas to others. However he lived a relatively capitalist life funded by donations from Engel’s capitalistic earnings in Engel’s father’s enterprises, and by gifts from Marx’s relatives.

Marx never lived the life he described in his writings, he was that smart. You would think with his capitalistic oriented income his followers should be called Marx-ups rather than Marxists or Marxians.

Absolutely. He was not displeased by good Champagne and slutty baronesses either.
One has to admit they are consistent. They keep leeching Capitalists to this day and they still like good wines and fast wo(men)! What KM, DSK? Marxism is the greates scam ever devised. Mr. Ponzi eat your heart out!

Marxian/Marxist systems of thought have no ‘explanatory power’ unless you live entirely in academia — the place where the political and bureaucratic class receives its foundational principles.

Marxist principles are like the crystal spheres. If you want to develop a modern, testable astrophysics, you have to jettison Ptolemy and Aristotle. If Marxist ‘theory’ is a theory, then someone should deal with its internal contradictions and predictive failures as the author has. And maybe, if you are paying attention, you then abandon the whole Marxist project — at least if you want to maintain the pretense of being ‘scientific’.

The place to start then is the examination of Marxist foundational principles, not fantasy assertions of its ‘explanatory power’. If I go to a palm reader, and he ‘explains’ my life experience accurately, I’m supposed to accept palmistry? Please. Only the modern college-educated believe such nonsense.

For this reason, the author’s criticism carries significant freight and is not some frivolous tangent into ‘necrophilia’ (a popular term amongst Marxist Sovietologist leveled against anyone who wants to investigate the failures of Marxism in that glorious society).

The foundational basis for policy is precisely our predicament. Too many of the college educated enter their professional lives utterly convinced of the intrinsic goodness of Marxist ideas even if they are oblivious to their origins. Aliases like ‘egalitarianism’ and ‘inequitable income distribution’ fill the heads of the average graduate who goes on to work in the Justice Department or the EPA (witness the mass of papers that body produces ‘documenting’ environmental racism based on class theory).

To imply that the author suggests the state remove Marxists from their positions is nothing but gamesmanship. It’s meant purely to inspire paranoia and divert attention from Marxist nonsense and illogic.

The pathologies we endure because the political class believes that ‘excess’ wealth is theft are legion. Until they stop trying to add epicycles onto epicycles to explain unequal income distribution, we are doomed to continued economic stagnation, poverty, and ultimately rivers of blood.

A very brilliant article. I have often thought that we will never rid ourselves of this Marxism idocy unless we can make it so obvious even a liberal can understand it. Sort of like the idea of the Trablant, being manufactured in the dying days of the Soviet Union. You couldn’t get a liberal to understand why socialism doesn’t work until you could show him a Trablant(the unreliable disaster of a car produced in quantity by the Soviet Union to bring “cheap” transportation to the masses prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989).

Even a liberal could see that taking $3,000 worth of raw materials and putting them together into a car using hundreds of hours of labor to sell for less than $500 was a losing proposition. It had to be explained to them slowly but the liberals did eventual get the message.

I would suggest in addition that capitalism relates to Marxism as evolution does to the notion of creation. Humans automatically believe in a creator, and in the possibility of a better world. It is only through science, and logic, that we discover that the so called flaws in the system are actually making the system work.

Communism has never failed because it has never been tried. Genocidal corporate imperialism from America crushed fledgling social justice movements wherever they sprung up,whether in Latin America, Southeast Asia,or the Middle East. CIA stooges like Pinochet and Suharto crushed popular uprisings to create a compassionate and just society, and when that failed, the American genocidal war machine itself intervened and slaughtered without mercy all peasants who dared stand against corporate oppression like in Vietnam. This is the only reason communism has “failed.” the corporate power structure terminates with extreme prejudice all movements that could provide a good example for workers worldwide had they succeeded.

Marx was probably wrong about his atheism, and he was certainly wrong about the necessity of the capitalist stage to pave the way for socialism. All we need to do is abolish corporations and we could easily create a caring, compassionate, just society where all people would never lack food, housing, or health care again.

I agree. Her first article was a smash hit. Not only that, it brought so many of her colleagues over to PJM. Now and then, one of them will post a comment, too.

I find PJM has a large effect on the national dialogue. Points made here seem to find their way to talking heads and politicians. If one makes a really good point here, expect that point or argument to spread. In time, I believe this will be magnified by having professional writers participating as readers and commenters here. Shrewd move by PJM to get Mrs. Hoyt on board.

We believers in compassion and love must be stealthful at times for a couple of reasons. First, because the corporate plutocracy regularly “disappears” those who stand against it. Look at the millions of fighters for social justice that were never heard from again once the CIA installed Pinochet. Look at the millions more sent to the ovens and showers of Gitmo because they courageously spoke the truth about the Bush genocide in Iraq. Look at the Kent State students murdered by the National Guard back in ’69. The brutality of corporations demands caution on the part of those who oppose them.

Second, the corporate media has engaged in a propaganda blitz aimed at White workers that has convinced them that social justice is a bad thing and the reason that they have no jobs or they are unable to feed and medicate their children with the pittance wages at jobs they might have is because the government gives money to Blacks, Hispanics, and Muslims. The truth that corporate plutocrats like the Koch brothers have squirreled away all of the nations’ wealth into their private trust funds can be a shocking revelation for many of them. The truth about socialism and its goodness is a revelation comparable to Neo’s liberation from the Matrix. White workers need to be eased into the truth.

Excerpt from Calvin Coolidge’s speech on the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence:

“They preached equality,” he said, “because they believed in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.”

In words that could easily have been penned in our own generation, Coolidge defended the eternal validity of the founding documents:

“About the declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences, which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning cannot be applied to this great chapter. If all men are created equal, that is final. … If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.”

And finally, this, from the man who held the presidency during the Roaring ’20s: “If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed to us, we must be like-minded as the fathers who created it. We must not sink into a pagan materialism. We must cultivate the reverence which they had for the things that are holy.”

Years ago I started to notice that some of the people I met and got to know well that had outstanding college grades (4.0 etc.) were as you got to know them more and more actually unable to think for themselves very well. This really messed with my mind in that I had attended some of the same schools and busted my butt to come out with a considerably lower GPA. I never really understood it since I had also met enough of the truly very smart people in these same schools and they went on to accomplish great things in many cases. Now I can begin to see that many of “dumb as rocks but highly academically credentialed friends) were simply able to memorize very well and worked their butts off through their schooling and consequently were perfect disciples for the Marxist propaganda instructors. I don’t mean to claim that most of them became Marxists, they didn’t but that there is a blind acceptance of whatever is being pushed by enough people in the college level academic world that they can fill the classes even when they are pushing such cr@p.

Exactly. They inhale their own gas. Academic Marxism ignores reality and they certify each others ideas. It’s the quintessential heresy with its grand structure. Not one of them stops to see that it is impossible to achieve social justice if you start with envy.
Comments like Throbbin Yobbin’s (if he is not actually joking) make me sad. In the 70′s I saw too many young friend mowed down on the streets of South America. Today their “leaders” teach in La Sorbonne, Columbia, Harvard, etc. they have a nice salary and live the perfect bourgeois life.

What amazes me is that the truckloads of fools who believe in the Marxist crap keep on coming. The pot of gold is always at the end of the rainbow and all they have to do is force everyone to march at bayonet point until we all can reach it and be happy.

The most pathetic part is that they believe themselves to be “intellectuals” while those who don’t swallow Marxism’s hook line and sinker are considered morons or reactionaries.

Yessir. We are a corrupt race and yet we must govern ourselves. Our Founding Fathers saw that and that is why they did not trusted any individual with too much power. Safety in numbers. Enough people have to share power to check each other’s corrupting tendencies. The great frame of reference is then the Christian moral standards (those that no one seems to be able to ever achieve) that serve as a point of reference.

That is why as we become less and less “a nation under God” the American Republic descends more and more into darkness. The worm of Marxism keeps gnawing at the tree of the Republic. Who will solve this problem and how?

I was never a Marxist as they were clearly a community of believers, not unlike the one I was leaving. But in today’s political dialogue, every time there is a governmental response to a perceived problem such as financial collapse, unemployment, or health care, the words “socialist” or “Marxist” get thrown out there. It as if we could just whup that bogey man, the good times would roll. Isn’t it pretty to think so?

When the government tries to gerrymander society, by involving itself in things like health care, that IS Socialism.

When they interfere with the marketplace, by throwing public money at failing private enterprises and nationalizing them, instead of letting them fail, that is National Socialism.

When the government tries to create the jobs, instead of letting the marketplace create the jobs, when they try to direct where the capital should go, and determine what areas should be emphasized or de-emphasized, when they engage in Central Planning, that is Marxism.

The pile of manure that is Marxism has unmistakable stench. We know it when we smell it.

So you guys are apparently purist free market folks. You do know, don’t you, that your position is now more odd and out of touch than Marxism, right? The present method is a little free enterprise here, a little government intrusion there. The general consensus on the need for bail-outs one and two by GWB, Paulson, Obama, and Geitner is a perfect example of the bi-partisan treachery abroad and pervasize in our political culture. In this context, your howling about Marxism and National Socialism is odd and it marginalizes you guys. It is one thing to say that the government has gone too far; reasonable people can disagree on that, but to get the full monti Marxist schtick belies the fact that a huge majority of our “all men are created equal” populace want the government to provide some help and support.
Said phenomenon drives General Malaise to despair on the the essence of humanity and its judgment. Too bad it is all we have to work with, eh? Starting to sound a little, possibly, ELITIST here, wouldn’t you say?

Quote: “but to get the full monti Marxist schtick belies the fact that a huge majority of our “all men are created equal” populace want the government to provide some help and support.”

Well, one facet of Marxism is “social metaphysics”. IOW, if the mob so declares it so, it IS so.

Also, in your propensity to be vague, you apparently equate free markets with some sort of economic anarchy. That’s a BS “straw man”. I suspect you got your indoctrination about free markets from academia and other statist shills.

It is important to understand that many of the so called Marxists or Socialists are really hard core Bolsheviks, as in The Communist Party core “we aren’t kidding around”, sociopathic Bolsheviks. They are nothing if not well organized and patient. They are also totally without any human approximation of scruples. Caveat Emptor to the truely nice.

I would take issue that Marx is the culprit, as much as the fact that so many (particularly in Europe) had already rejected the God of Nature – the Judeo-Christian God that created us in His image and gave us our rights because of that. Marx and his never to be acheived, utopian distortion of all that is good, is merely the substitute for those seeking a worldly god.

For this the fools gave up the source of all love and all truth. No Marxist would ever die for you…

We must also take into consideration that marxism offers to many people the same kind of “comfort” that the (only apparently more vulgar) antisemitism offers:
all the evils of the world are caused by ONE cause (private property, the capital, the corporations,…all names for “the Jew”) and the marxists can sleep well by thinking that once you have taken away that single factor, all will be good.

So, marxism is a very primitive way of “thinking” and this causes its success with large illiterate masses and with young people.

Marxian is such a disingenuous word. Every time these collectivists wear out their welcome, they engage in some rebranding. Progressives became Liberals becoming Progressives again. Marxists became Communists, became Socialists, became Social-Democrats.

Marxist is such a hard word. We prefer the kinder-and-gentler, warm-and-fuzzier Marxian. Only kind of like Marxist. “Tastes great. Less appalling.”

You folks must also be quite concerned about the Marxian response that the Feds are making in Tuscaloosa and Joplin. Why can’t the Federal Government mind its own damned business? You can smell the Marxism wafting about as redolent as the aroma of the broken pine trees.

Having read Current Trends in Marxism I don’t quite buy your analysis. According to that book Marxism was part of a strain of philosophy part of which believed there was a time of “primitive communism”. It was a time in which an individual man worked for the greater good of the tribe. It was all anyone knew and therefore there was no means or reason for oppression. Once the division of labor came to be there could be different statuses for humans and one human could use another human as a tool. Division of labor was positive for economic and cultural development but it led to a system whereby man was alienated from himself. The true nature of man was collective not individualist and certainly not capitalist. Not only that but the societal structures were flawed and did not reflect legitimacy. According to Marx the base determines the superstructure. The base being the unequal division of labor.

Part 2 of the philosophy is that since communism is the true state of man sooner or later the greater society has to fall as society divides up into dysfunctional classes. When that happens the proletariat will rearrange society so that the division of labor realigns with man’s natural communal nature. Hence a perfect society. The value theory of labor was not meant to reflect the actual workings of an actual modern economy. It was meant to describe the belief that the true economy was communal and once realized there was a real and actual economic model to be followed (hence scientific socialism as Marxists called it).

What was also obvious to Marxists was that the society in question was clearly European society. Marxism is a racist philosophy. Lesser mortals would be along for the ride at best or would be part of stagnant societies walled off by their betters. Marx would have been quite at home in Nazi Germany. He was a German philosopher and would have known quite well the theories justifying National Socialism. He may not have intellectually agreed with many of them but certainly the fact that Germany was setting the world to rights would have been his dream come true.

The Marxian issue we face (and Marxian is fair to use since Marxism existed early on as a philosophical strand of thought to already committed socialists) is that the Marxists have very cleverly interwoven ideas of oppressed races with the European idea of self superiority. It appeals to angry whites in that it gives them an exalted sense of self while providing false hopes to lesser developed nations. It is not a coincidence that countries like Cambodia and China suffered so greatly under Marxism. Marxism clearly sees these as ancillary peoples that need blunt methods to bring them in line with superior Europe. Rather than trying to explain the economic contradictions of Marxism (which clearly views economics as a tool to explain the underlying philosophy and not a means to explain actual economic systems) it is far better and easier to show that its junk philosophy.

What is needed is to show the provincialism, racism, cronyism, false intellectualism and directed hatred of Marxism. It gets followers because it always postulates that their own anger is directed at a legitimate cause “You are alienated because the system creates alienation and they did this to you. Now kill”.

I would certainly be with you, and we can vote out the “Marxians” in government, but what about all of the “Marxians” outside of government now that they have been indoctinated by the universities – they are now a driving force also. We don’t have THAT many literal de-programmers. I.E., it’s very difficult to deal with changing the ideaology of these people after they are totally indoctrinated by university brainwashings.